Friday, June 2, 2017

The totalitarianism that taints public debate

Free speech is a cornerstone
of democracy, but we can never take it for granted. On polarising
issues, its limits are constantly tested.

Dr Lance O’Sullivan got up on
stage at a Kaitaia screening of the controversial anti-vaccination documentary Vaxxed last week and told the audience that
their attendance would cause babies to die.

O’Sullivan is a much admired
doctor in Northland – he was New Zealander of the Year in 2014 – and an
impassioned champion of vaccination programmes.

The makers of Vaxxed claim the vaccine that immunises
children against measles, mumps and rubella can cause autism – a theory
discredited by medical authorities. O’Sullivan wanted the audience to know that
he has held dying children who would have survived had they been immunised.

He subsequently explained to
John Campbell of Radio New Zealand that he was worried that immunisation rates
in Northland were declining because of erroneous anti-vaccine propaganda –
hence his decision to speak at the screening of Vaxxed.

When I first heard a radio
report about the Kaitaia incident, I wondered whether O’Sullivan had stepped
out of line. The report seemed to suggest that he wanted to prevent people
seeing the film.

That would have been an unacceptable
intrusion on freedom of expression. Section 14 of the Bill of Rights Act
rightly protects the right to free speech, “including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart
information and opinions of any kind in any form”.

The
moment we start suppressing opinions, no matter how overwhelming the arguments
against them may seem, we are on a slippery slope. The true test of free speech
is our willingness to uphold the right of people to say things that we don’t
like.

As the American political activist Noam
Chomsky put it:“If you’re really in favour of free speech, then you’re
in favour of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise,
you’re not in favour of free speech.” It's possibly the only thing Chomsky ever said that I agree with.

But when I watched a video of O’Sullivan speaking from the stage at Kaitaia, he
didn’t appear to be making any attempt to stop people watching the film. He
just wanted the audience to know that he believed Vaxxed was based on fraudulent misinformation. In other words he
was asserting his own right to free speech.

He reportedly performed a haka, which seemed gratuitously confrontational, but
otherwise he seemed calm and respectful. His statement to the audience that their
presence would cause babies to die may have been a theatrical exaggeration, but
you could see where he was coming from.

Unfortunately,
O’Sullivan later spoiled it all by saying, in an interview with the Stuff
website, that health professionals who reportedly attended the screening should
be sacked.

This
time he did step over the line. It’s not for O’Sullivan to decide what opinions
other health professionals should hold, or be exposed to.

At
this point, his legitimate espousal of the pro-immunisation viewpoint
transmuted into an authoritarian insistence that anyone who didn’t fall into
line with the officially “correct” view should be punished.

This
is bullying. It produces the type of cowed, conformist groupthink that we see
at its most extreme in places like North Korea.

In any case, who
knows what motives other health professionals might have had for attending the
screening? It could be argued that it’s their duty to acquaint themselves with
false propaganda so that they are then in a better position to counter it when
advising patients. “Know your enemy,” the saying goes.

But the key point is this: liberal
democracies are based on a contest of ideas, and we can have that contest only if
competing ideas are publically weighed and debated. People can usually be
trusted, when presented with the evidence, to figure out which argument is the
correct one.

Stifling
free speech by suggesting people should be sacked for deviating from the
approved view is a denial of democracy and intellectual freedom. Unfortunately,
however, it’s typical of the ideological totalitarianism that increasingly taints
public debate – the more so since social media platforms made it easy to gang
up on dissenters and intimidate them into silence.

We
see this manifested in all sorts of ways. Climate change doubters are constantly
shouted down on the spurious basis that “the science is settled” (it’s not). In
Australia, family-owned brewery Coopers was recently subjected to an angry boycott simply because it sponsors the Bible Society, which opposes gay
marriage.

Intolerance
of dissent takes a variety of forms, but the ultimate aim is always the same:
to silence the dissenters. I saw another example last week when Wellington’s Dominion Post published an article by
former MP Gordon Copeland, a devout
Christian and pro-lifer, urging that the principle of informed consent should
be applied when a woman is considering an abortion - hardly a radical proposition when, as Copeland pointed out, informed consent has been entrenched in medical practice since the Cartwright inquiry of the 1980s.

It was a thoughtful, sympathetic
and carefully argued piece that acknowledged the complexity of the abortion
issue. But a letter in response, from an abortion rights activist, attacked Copeland’s
article as a “paternalistic and sexist rant”. He had committed the ideological
offence, as a male, of writing about abortion, which some feminists consider none
of men’s business.

Whatever anyone thought about
Copeland’s argument, there was no way his article could be described as a rant,
which my dictionary defines as an angry tirade.

But the enforcers of
ideological orthodoxy have little respect for semantic precision. If you want
to disparage an opinion you don’t like, you label it a rant. We can add this to
the repertoire of tactics used to deter anyone foolish enough to exercise their
right of free expression.

FOOTNOTE: This column was written before a hysterical row broke out in Australia over tennis legend Margaret Court's public opposition to same-sex marriage. Court's personal opinion, which she was perfectly entitled to express in a free society, was seen as so threatening to the prevailing ideology that people wanted her name removed from Melbourne's Margaret Court Arena. What next, I wonder - public book burnings?

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.